Come and see us!

For anyone at the Design Research Conference next Friday, we'll be giving a five-minute presentation before lunch about our project. Or if you're more motivated by food, come join our discussion table over lunch as we talk about how to take the tendencies identified in behavioral economics and apply this understanding to the design process. 

Organizing and Experimenting

This week, we forged into more designerly territory. After a month of ramping up on principles of behavioral economics (which we acknowledge is massively insufficient to be experts on the subject), we have begun to prototype tools to help designers access experimentally-identified human tendencies.

As part of our divide-and-conquer plan, half of our group is looking at designing tools for the research and analysis stages, and the other half at the synthesis stage.

problem statements we're addressing

Forming these subgroups has allowed us to cover more ground in our search while increasing our focus. Our hope is that our investigations will inform each other and that we'll ultimately be able to integrate our findings.

Research & Analysis & Behavioral Tendencies

The research and analysis team has been looking at ways of helping designers know what to look for when they're in the field. We've looked at ways of linking identified biases and tendencies to existing frameworks and methods:

Can tendencies be tied into human factors and

create deeper understanding in these fields?

Can a field tool direct attention to factors in irrational

decision making? Could this be sufficient (do people need to

know they're seeing "status quo bias", or can they just

observe that everyone picks the default?)

This team has also been looking at creating decision archetypes to understand the factors that contribute to user biases. We have taken an initial stab at what these factors are and are testing this through a decision-log for users and a corresponding scoring of our list of identified tendencies. We hope that this information will not only provide us components of an archetypical decision, but also give an insight into how tendencies relate and concur.

Logs of user decisions to help us develop archetypes

Creating solutions that account for behavioral tendencies (aka synthesis)

The synthesis team has been looking at how to organized the biases and tendencies. To accelerate the testing time, they evaluated our list of tendencies to select 30 that give broad coverage, speak to high likelihood situations, and apply to the synthesis phase. With these in hand, the team is developing a tool that can communicate what the tendencies are and a navigation system to help designers know which tendencies to design for.

team working on refining the tendency list

We're excited to be making things and to start getting a better sense of some of the questions that have concerned us since we began this project (how much education is needed? how much additional work can this be?) Looking forward to posting what we learn!

So here's the thing: we're all irrational.

People often act in ways that aren’t rational, as traditional economics would have us believe. They volunteer to do work for free, they smoke cigarettes, or they fail to take advantage of 401(k) plans.

In other words, people are often irrational, a reality that conflicts with traditional economists’ assumptions. For better or worse, all sorts of factors - including social, cognitive, and emotional factors - influence the way people make decisions in the real world.

What does this mean for design?
We're not denying that people are irrational - in fact, we think that recognizing this is the first step to better design, both from a designer or decision architect's perspective, and an end-user's perspective. Designers influence users' decision-making processes, whether they realize it or not. It is up to designers to recognize their influence, and design accordingly.

And who are "we," anyway?
We're six students at the Institute of Design working on an independent research project to explore how insights from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics can be used to design better products, services, experiences, and business strategies. Over the course of the next 10 weeks, we'll be developing and prototyping tools that integrate these insights into the design process.

Getting off to a designerly start:
sticky notes, white boards, and Macs abound

And what is this blog about, exactly?
We'll be using this blog to share our progress throughout the course of the project, document our insights, and publish our findings. We'll also use this blog to share interesting links, articles, and experiments we come across in our secondary research.